Occupational Therapy News OTnews April 2019 | Page 14

FOCUS ON PERSONALISED CARE
James Sanderson talks to Tracey Samuels
about the opportunity personalised care offers
occupational therapists in England to support
people in ever more innovative and new ways
J
ames Sanderson, Director of Personalised Care
at NHS England, oversees strategy and delivery
for a range of programmes that are helping to
empower people to have greater choice and
control over their care; including shared decision-making,
personalised care and support planning, approaches
to self management support, self-care, personal health
budgets, social prescribing and patient choice.
Formerly Chief Executive and Accounting Officer for
the Independent Living Fund, James has had a significant
amount of experience working with occupational
therapists over the years, both at ILF and NHS England,
and he ‘absolutely recognises’ that personalised care is
‘at the heart of occupational therapy practice’.
‘Occupational therapists naturally are geared up
to begin with that conversation of what matters to
somebody; taking them through the opportunity to
develop methodologies, systems and approaches to
achieving greater activity and their goals,’ he says.
‘There have been many approaches to personalised
care, or person-centred care, over the years, in both
health and social care settings, but what I’ve discovered
in the NHS is that, despite some really excellent progress
and examples across the country, these individual
programmes were quite fragmented from each other, or
from the system; almost being delivered alongside what
people consider to be the mainstay of NHS services.’
As a result, James stresses that he is keen to bring
everything together in a much more coherent way.
14 OTnews April 2019
‘These programmes are interdependent,’ he says. ‘You
cannot undertake successful social prescribing without
understanding what that means to an individual and
looking holistically at their needs from a personalised care
and support plan.
‘So we wanted to bring all these disciplines and
enablers together, to create a much more cohesive
approach, because when delivered in concert, these
things create much better outcomes for individuals and
the system.’
In order to make personalised care a reality, NHS
England wants up to 2.5 million people to be benefitting
by 2023-24. But how can occupational therapists help to
achieve this rather ambitious goal?
Recognising this is a large-scale aspiration, James
adds: ‘If we weren’t being so ambitious, I don’t think we
would properly achieve the shift we need. The long-term
plan for the NHS sets out some key things; reforming
primary care, changes to accident and emergency,
moving to digital services and looking at population
health, through the creation of integrated care systems.’
And within all this features personalised care. ‘[We
have] probably the biggest statement on personalised
care within any healthcare system, so 2.5 million people
is ambitious, [and we want to] double that again over the
next 10 years, but I think it is absolutely achievable.’
However, as he exclaims, there is huge amount of
scope to go even further. ‘If you take things like social
prescribing, for example, we estimate that there is an
Everybody wins